1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to the field of configuration management database (CMDB) and more particularly, to establishing policy artifacts and automatic tagging of the same.
2. Description of the Related Art
In order to ensure the security and availability of network resources, businesses employ a variety of usage policies. Usage policies exist at various granularities to control the functioning of network resources. The usage policy “only software developers can log onto development servers” is an example of a high-level usage policy, whereas “available memory space on development servers must be a minimum of 64 MB” is a low-level usage policy. Such policies are often defined, enforced, and stored by independent systems across a business network.
The lack of a central repository impedes access to information regarding policies and their relationships to network resources. For example, determining all the policies that affect a single server is a labor-intensive task that must by performed manually. Further, policies are often either anonymous or inflexibly categorized in regards to their applicability. That is, generating a list of policies that pertain to network availability requires examining all policies because the policies either do not have categories or the categorization schema does not allow for a policy to belong to more than one category. For example, the policy “CPU utilization of production servers should not exceed 60%” can be considered both a performance and an availability policy.
Configuration management databases (CMDBs) are often used by large companies to track physical and virtual network resources, such as computers, printers, and network connections. The CMDB records configuration items (CIs) and details about the important attributes and relationships between CIs. A key success factor in implementing a CMDB is the ability to automatically discover information about the CIs (auto-discovery) and track changes as they happen. Conventional implementations of CMDBs do not include policies among the resource items for tracking.